According To The variety Bethany Joy Lenz isn’t
only opening up about her experience in the Big House Family cult. In her
new book, “Dinner for Vampires,” the actor details about her time as Haley
James (later Scott) on “One Tree Hill.”

Lenz writes that she initially
passed on the WB series since she was focused on doing film and didn’t want to
be “stuck on a teen soap.” Eventually, after the actor cast as Haley didn’t
work out for the pilot, she was called again; the executive knew her since he’d
tried to get her to read for “What I Like About You.”

“The show was marketed toward
tween girls, and I was concerned that the big-sister role I was testing for —
which eventually went to the lovely Jennie Garth — was a woman living with her
boyfriend,” Lenz writes about the Amanda Bynes-led show. “I didn’t want to normalize
‘living in sin’ for young girls.”

The
night before the “One Tree Hill” screen test, the executive called her manager,
and said, “You tell her this show is about fucking and sucking, and if she’s
gonna have a problem with that, she shouldn’t come in tomorrow.”

Luckily,
Lenz believed in the script enough to see past that. The drama, which aired for
nine seasons on The WB/The CW from 2003 to 2012, was much more than that and
she related to Haley. But the point came up again down the line.

For
example, she was once asked to try on bras for a scene and she pushed back,
saying it didn’t suit her character.

“‘This
is what the creator wants you to wear in the scene,’ the wardrobe designer
would say apologetically. When I stood my ground as a matter of religious
modesty, my manager would get a call from him: ‘She’s being difficult again. We
told you what this show was about!’” Lenz writes about the show’s creator, Mark
Schwahn. “And, in fairness, they did. The ‘fucking and sucking’ executive had
been very clear about that … But my manager was in LA and three hours behind
North Carolina time, so every time I tried to get ahold of her to explain the
situation and ask her to intervene, it slowed down production, which just made
me look even more ‘difficult’ to everyone else.”

Schwahn
was publicly accused of assault and
harassment by
Hilarie Burton and a number of the show’s cast
and crew in
2017. He has never responded to the claims, but the women talk about the
allegations at length on the “Drama Queens” podcast.

In her book, Lenz compares Schwahn’s motives to that of the cult leader, a man she calls Les in the book, who
also tried to control everything she did.

“Now I see the similarity between the creator’s strategy and Les’s
strategy. In hindsight, it became clear that they both used geography to
isolate us young and trusting people from our support systems and pressure us
into doing what they wanted. But whereas the creator’s only leverage was fame,
Les’s leverage was my eternal salvation,” she writes. “The more my personal
beliefs and preferences interfered with the creator’s demands, the more he
started writing things into the storylines to purposefully humiliate or
antagonize me. Like making other characters call Haley ‘fat.’ Or having Haley
‘overreact’ to her high school boyfriend watching porn.”

Although the cult leaders told her that none of her coworkers were
“spiritually safe” to trust, she managed to form connections with some of her
colleagues in the first few years of filming in Wilmington, North Carolina.

That changed at the end of 2005, after she married a man she
refers to as “Q” or “QB” in the book, the leader’s son. Her husband moved to
Wilmington. (Lenz never shares his real name in the book, but her husband was
Michael Galeotti.)

“He monitored where I went, what I watched, who I talked to. He
didn’t even want me to own anything that represented my life before marriage,”
she writes. “When he met the cast and crew, everyone was cordial, and a few
people, like Paul [Johansson], made an effort to befriend him. But Q resisted.
He mistrusted them all. He had never been prepared to face the world on his
own. He had been trained to be terrified of the unknown, groomed to need Les
there to guide him through everything. On set, he managed his fear by smiling
and feigning sweetness and docility. Later at home, he’d wax on about what
frauds they all were.”

She continues, “Things quickly got worse. He wanted to read every
script to see if he was okay with what I would be doing in that episode. He
examined photos of my wardrobe choices to make sure there wasn’t any midriff or
cleavage. Who was I eating lunch with? It better not have been a male cast
member. Was I confiding in anyone at work about our relationship struggles? Not
if I knew what was good for me! Only Jezebel wives disrespect their husbands by
airing dirty laundry.” Her costars, she tells Variety,
didn’t know about him trying to control her wardrobe or storylines. “I
knew they would think it was weird. There was a lot that I knew people would
think was weird, and I justified it by saying, they just don’t have ‘spiritual
eyes’ to see things,” she says. “It builds kind of a sense of superiority.
That’s the only way you can manage living that way.”

“Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an
Actual Cult!)” is available on Amazon and on stands now.